Simon Schubert

Biography

Simon Schubert is best known for creating intricate works by meticulously creasing a single sheet of paper into flattened images of real or imagined interiors. Typically grand, the ballrooms, coffered ceilings, stately staircases, mirrored corridors, and doorways he depicts are realistic yet illusory. Void of any human trace, they reflect notions of isolation, loneliness, and loss. Schubert’s mixed-media sculptures, inspired by Surrealism and the writings of Samuel Beckett, similarly center around the concept of disappearance. An untitled 2006 work, for example, depicts a woman in a coffin-like bathtub, completely engulfed by her own hair. Similarly, the mixed-media installation Le EL (2005) appropriates René Magritte’s 1937 painting Not to Be Reproduced, in which a man faces a mirror that casts an unsettling reflection of his back.